An international team of astronomers, led by the UK's University of Cambridge, has discovered the oldest galaxy ever observed. It originated more than 13 billion years ago, when the Universe was only 700 million years old.

The respective research was published in the science journal Nature.

Astronomers have discovered an early galaxy using the James Webb Space Telescope.

As the observations have shown, the processes of star formation in the open system stopped long ago. Astronomers believe that the birth of new stars has stopped due to various factors that have cleaned out the gas pile. This could be due to the activity of a supermassive black hole or for other reasons.

"Everything seems to happen faster and more dramatically in the early universe, and that might include galaxies moving from a star-forming phase to dormant or quenched," said cosmologist Tobias Looser, the paper's first author.

Because the aforesaid galaxy is so far from Earth, astronomers have observed it as it was 13 billion years ago. Experts have admitted that in past epochs this system could have come back to life and started forming stars again.